


No Buttons, No Thimbles

by winged1



Series: Child in Wolf's Clothing [1]
Category: Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies)
Genre: AU, Friendship, Gen, all kinds of timeline shenanigans, writing the series backwards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-23
Updated: 2013-03-23
Packaged: 2017-12-06 04:58:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/731692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winged1/pseuds/winged1
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Steve wakes up--and before the events of the Avengers--he sees a familiar face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Buttons, No Thimbles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ladyoflorien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyoflorien/gifts).



When Steve wakes up in that horribly, suspiciously fake recovery room, he’s only relying on instinct and training. Instinct to know _something’s not right_ and training to know the way out. He wasn’t expecting the walls to give so easy, but it wasn’t world-shattering when they did. 

The realization of his being asleep for so long--that is shattering, it’s like someone just hit him with a deuce-and-a-half, wheels and engine and all, just socked him a good one. He can’t breathe, he can’t process, but that knowledge that needs no thought behind it settles into his stomach like lead. He’s lost everyone. Bucky went first, and Steve thought nothing about him being gone that night at the expo; of course he’d join the army, join Bucky. That was never a question. But the Commandos, Peggy--god, _Peggy_ \--even Phillips were all gone. 

He didn’t remember the little girl he’d brought back from Krasberg until he came across her in a grocery store, one carefully selected so that he might have the semblance of normalcy in picking out his own breakfast cereal. The market was as old-fashioned by this new decade’s standards as it could get, but that was what made it charming, what drew the admittedly older-than-average crowd to it. And what made it perfect for Steve to acclimate to modernity with. 

Synthia looked so different, and yet so much the same, when he stopped next to her in front of the neat little rows of candy, she surveying the rows of chocolate bars with a strange kind of sad longing and he boggling at the bright neon colors everything seemed to have. Had candy been this bright the last time he was here? “Steve,” she’d said, unexpectedly as she turned towards him--and he recognized her almost instantly. That face had aged, but the big brown eyes flecked with blue, and the wave to her now-gray hair were unchanged. She was old; she had to be nearly eighty, eighty-five, although she’d grown elegantly and was still clear-eyed as she’d always been. “I thought you were dead.” 

“I thought you’d be...” he didn’t know how to go on from there. “...Younger.” Had he really expected Synthia to be the same little girl who’d been in the factory with Bucky, unhurt but scared of him despite? It seemed like worlds away, and yet it all came back with an unpleasant rush when she smiled at him, no longer wary but a not quite entirely happy either. The unexpected friendship they’d shared for the little while he’d been hunting her father was still warm, a memory she hadn’t let tarnish and he...well, he still felt it expanding in his chest like a balloon, confused because she wasn’t a child, but glad she wasn’t dead. 

“I... I grew up, Steve. I’m old, so much older than eight.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of a half-made-up AU wherein the life and existence of one Synthia Schmidt (yes, that Schmidt, the Red Skull's daughter) are altered to fit within the Marvel Cinematic universe. All recognizable characters and milieux belong to their respective owners, please don't sue me for them.


End file.
